Network Driver Interface Specification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) is an application programming interface (API) for network interface cards (NICs). It was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3Com Corporation, and is nowadays mostly used in Microsoft Windows, but the open-source ndiswrapper and Project Evil driver wrapper projects allow many NDIS-compliant NICs to be used with Linux and FreeBSD, respectively. magnussoft ZETA, a derivative of BeOS, supports a number of NDIS drivers.
The NDIS is a Logical Link Control (LLC) that forms the upper sublayer of the OSI data link layer (layer 2 of 7) and acts as an interface between layer 2 and 3 (the Network Layer). The lower sublayer is the Media Access Control (MAC) device driver.
The NDIS is a library of functions often referred to as a "wrapper" that hides the underlying complexity of the NIC hardware and serves as a standard interface for level 3 network protocol drivers and the hardware level MAC drivers. Another common LLC is the Open Data-Link Interface (ODI).
[edit] See also
- Open Data-Link Interface (ODI)
- Uniform Driver Interface (UDI)
